Proud Moments
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 15, 2007
I told this story at the Service of Remembrance we held down in the Chapel a few weeks ago on the tragic 4th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraqi War, so I will ask the forbearance of those of you who were there for the next few minutes. In thinking on what I consider to be some of the prouder moments of my life I had to go back nearly 40 years for this one; and it wasn't until some time had gone by that I more fully recognized and appreciated it as a proud moment.
I was 22 years old - even younger than my son is now. The day was February 6, 1968 and the place was Washington, D.C., more specifically the Arlington National Cemetery. I was a seminarian and had traveled down to Washington from Rochester, New York with a few of my classmates for a gathering of at least a couple of thousand religious leaders from across America sponsored by an organization called Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. We were based at large downtown Church - the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.
The highlight, and most publicly visible part, of this gathering was to be a peace vigil at the Arlington National Cemetery to both remember the war dead, and to hear an address by Martin Luther King. At almost the literal 11th hour, however, a court order was secured that enjoined us from meeting there, and enjoined Dr. King from speaking there, on the grounds that we were a partisan group and not sufficiently patriotic enough to hold such an event at such a site. A last minute compromise was worked out whereby we were permitted to hold a ten-minute, silent vigil in the cemetery; and would then go back to the church to hear Dr. King's address. I still remember being in one of the caravan of buses that took us out to Arlington, and being firmly instructed to not say a word from the moment we got off until we reboarded. In light of the questioning of our patriotism we were each given a small American flag to carry, which I did.
I must have been on one of the first buses to leave the church since I found myself near the front of the crowd when we gathered at the cemetery. I was close enough that if I looked around and over the heads and shoulders of those in front of me I could see Dr. King, along with Rabbi Abraham Heschel and a Catholic Bishop who were facing us. I could just barely hear Dr. King say, "In this period of absolute silence, let us pray." A few moments later Rabbi Heschel spoke a phrase in Hebrew that translates "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" These words are originally found in the one of the Psalms of the Hebrew scripture; and are also reported to have been spoken by Jesus just before he died on the cross. The Catholic Bishop, whose identity I did not get, then said, "Let us go in peace. Amen". We silently returned to our buses and went back to the church where we heard Martin Luther King offer a stinging critique of the war - and of what it was doing to our soldiers, to the Vietnamese people, and to the fabric of what was a very polarized nation at the time.
Slightly less than two months later, Dr. King was murdered in Memphis at the age of 39, and the scriptural words spoken by Rabbi Heschel - "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" - came to have an eerie ring and echo to both the black and white Americans who had come to recognize and value the prophetic stature that Dr. King had truly attained.
That day, and the events surrounding it, have been much on my mind lately. I think about how on the third Monday of each January we now celebrate a national holiday in honor of a man who only two months before his death was not considered sufficiently patriotic enough to deliver a speech in a national cemetery because he was opposed to a war we were waging. I think of how that Clergy and Laity organization I was a part of was accused of undermining the morale of the troops because we wanted them to come home. I remember being told that if we didn't stop the communists in Hanoi we'd be fighting them off right here in America. Today we enjoy full diplomatic relations with a unified Vietnam, with Hanoi as its capitol; and Dr. King is accorded a national holiday. I think of these things now as I hear yet another stanza of a distressingly familiar song.
I won't belabor that point, however. I no longer feel I need to in this setting - lest my song start sounding overly familiar as well. What I mostly recall from the incident I've just described is how proud I felt, with all of my 22 years of living, to be standing in the presence of Dr. King. I am proud to have stood with a man who was much vilified in his day for the moral stances he took, but who turned out to have been on the right side of history. And as his legacy has grown and become more fully understood and appreciated, as well as debated in our country, my pride at being able to have been just a brief and fleeting witness to only a small snapshot of Dr. King's amazing ministry has only increased.
The ministry in which I've now been engaged for almost 40 years since that day has been partially defined by that moment - by seeing how persons, how religious leaders, from a variety of faith backgrounds can stand together in moral witness when the circumstances call for it. Even though it was a painful time, I'm glad I was there.
Expanding out from this experience I think on the moments when we feel pride - whether it's pride of accomplishment, of achievement - like seeing a son or daughter graduate college, as Michele and I will do in a few weeks; or, as in the instance I've just described, being an part of profound and moving moment. It is these kinds of proud moments that tell us a good deal about who we are and what we value most and how we choose, and have chosen, to live our lives. I would invite each of you to do a little personal inventory (sometime after I'm through talking, that is) about what you consider to be your prouder moments, and how those moments have both defined and affected the course of your life.
Given all I've said to this point how, then, did something like pride come to head up the list of what are called "the seven deadly sins"? The psychiatrist, social ethicist, and author, Dr. Willard Gaylin, in his book Feelings, raises the same question: "How in the world did a nice emotion like pride get elected the first of the seven deadly sins? Why is not pride one of the cardinal virtues?" Well put, and well asked.
A prior question might well be: What are the seven deadly sins and how did we get them? We're going to take a quick side loop and pick up that one. The seven deadly sins are [deep breath]: Pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. They just roll off the tongue - sort of the same way the comedian George Carlin can just roll off those seven words you can't say on TV. I can recite those too in one breath. I'll forego that. Even a liberal church has to have some bounds of propriety.
The seven deadly sins, to get back to that, were originally formulated by Pope Gregory I, later known as Gregory the Great, during his papacy clear back in the 6th century. A few centuries later - in the 13th century - they were re-visited and reformulated by Thomas Aquinas. They are not Biblical in any precise way. There is no passage in the Bible that begins, "These are the seven deadly sins...." and then lists them off. Instead they were an attempt by the Catholic Church to come up with a set of categories under which, or into which, every conceivable and commit-able sin could be classified or traced back to.
I'm not altogether sure just what purpose that served but I still can't help but be impressed at how Pope Gregory's and Thomas Aquinas' formulation has remained in place, and in popular consciousness, over the centuries. For example, back in 1993 the New York Times ran a seven week series in their Sunday Book Review Section wherein they invited seven prominent authors to each contribute an article on one of the seven deadly sins - with each one of them writing from his or her literary perspective. So, some 1500 years (give or take a century or two) after they were devised, a secular publication like the New York Times does a series on the seven deadly sins. With that kind of staying power they must have something going for them.
On that note let's get back to what Pope Gregory considered the head-line sin, namely pride; and also re-visit Dr. Gaylin's question about how what he calls a "nice emotion" like pride got at the top of that sinful list. The Church made its case for the primacy of the sin of pride by noting that it was the first sin committed by the first human beings - Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They eat the so-called forbidden fruit (there is no reference to an apple in the Book of Genesis by the way); they thereby gain the knowledge of good and evil, and are subsequently banished from Paradise.
Even back when the Bible was the central and authoritative base of my religious belief I couldn't figure that one out. What does the attainment of the knowledge of good and evil have to do with the sin of pride? (I asked) The answer I got was that the real sin of pride that Adam and Eve committed was in thinking they knew more than God or that they were better than God. That worked for me for a time - and in one sense it still does. A similar theme plays itself out in Greek mythology as well. If I were to offer the extreme Cliff Notes version of a Greek tragedy it would go like this: 1) Hero rises to great heights after seeking the help and guidance of the gods and goddesses. 2) Hero reaches the point where he figures he's so great and so cool that he no longer needs to acknowledge his indebtedness to said gods and goddesses. 3) Hero takes a great fall. A tragedy in three acts.
Several centuries before Pope Gregory I, the Greeks had their categories of sins or human transgressions as well - they had four of them instead of seven. And heading their list, too, was hubris, or pride; and the Greeks and the Romans had their mythology to back that up, just as the Judaic and Christian traditions later came to have their mythologies in order to make the same point. So what is it with this alleged sin of pride?
I think the point being made is that the shadow side of pride is a lack of humility, or the absence of a willingness to seriously examine one's motives or rationales in taking a certain course of action. The shadow side of pride is reaching a point where you figure you know best, regardless of any other input or any other opinion or any challenge. To put it metaphorically, the shadow side of pride is thinking you know more than God - or, even worse, thinking you have an exclusive pipeline directly into to mind and will of God. To put it in more human and humanistic language, the real sin of pride is in believing that your own thoughts, deeds, actions, and motivations are beyond any serious questioning.
I'll briefly return to the life of Martin Luther King to expand a bit on this point. Dr. King was a very proud man who had a very clear sense of who he was and where he wanted to take his life. He was also aware of, and struggled with, his shortcomings and personal failings. He had many reasons to be proud. He came out of the segregated South of the early 1950s to earn a PhD at Boston University. He passed up what could have been a promising career in academia and answered a call to the African-American Church instead. By the age of 30, following the Montgomery bus boycott, he was recognized as the premier civil rights leader in America. He stood next to Lyndon Johnson when the President signed the 1964 civil rights bill, which he - Dr. King - had been instrumental in getting passed. He was still a month shy of his 36th birthday when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Who wouldn't be rightfully and fully proud of all that? I sure Dr. King was - as he had every reason to be.
But as I've read his biographies, and listened to interviews with people who knew him best and worked most closely with him, the thing that has impressed me the most is how Dr. King would so often turn to those whom he knew and trusted - and who he knew did not always share his opinions on how to best proceed with their cause - to get their critique. I recall a televised interview with Andrew Young where he specifically spoke to this. Mr. Young recalled how Dr. King would gather a circle of advisors around him before taking a course of action and ask them to have at him as to how good of an idea, or not, they thought his plans were. He would deliberately seek out a wide range of opinion. And he'd do the same after a course of action had been taken: Was this the right thing to have done? How might we have done it differently, and better? Should we try it again or let it go?
In the end it was Dr. King himself who had to make the call, and who had to live with the outcomes of his decisions. But he never became so full of himself that he avoided seeking an honest critique of himself and of what he was doing. Dr. King was no Biblical literalist, but he read his Bible in such a way that he took seriously the warnings he found in it about becoming so taken with your own greatness and your own knowledge and your own sureness that you cease questioning yourself. We now have a President who claims to seek similar divine guidance. I don't question his claim. I only wish he could find the same message in that divine guidance as Dr. King did.
I'll close on the note with which I opened. We each and all need our proud moments. We need to have those uplifting, positive moments wherein we gain a better and heightened sense of who we are and what we are about, and of what it is we most prize and value. We need to know the pride of accomplishment and achievement - for it is in such moments that we learn about our personal potentialities and possibilities we may not have even known we had. Without such moments, in fact, our lives would have very little meaning or purpose or direction. Think of what a miserable life it would be if you went all the way through it without ever being proud of anything you ever did, or were a part of. So, cherish your proud moments.
Cherish as well the humility that comes with a true sense of pride. I think the Shakers, for all of their quite strange and quaint ways, had it right in finding the true balance between pride and humility. They took pride in their simple tasks, in their creativity, in their achievements, and in the way of life they created for themselves. They complimented their simple, but deeply held pride, with an honoring of simplicity and of knowing where one should rightfully "come down" as they put it. When I reflect on my own proud moments, I often find myself recalling, at the same time, the Shaker hymn with which we will close our service for today - "'Tis a Gift to be Simple."
Stephen Edington
April 15, 2007
